Emerging evidence suggests that gender is a defining feature of personhood. Studies show that gender is the primary social category individuals use to perceive humanness and the social category most strongly related to seeing someone—or something—as human. However, the universality of gender’s primacy in social perception and its precedence over other social categories like race and age have been debated. We examined the primacy of gender perception in the Mayangna community of Nicaragua, a population with minimal exposure to Western influences, to test whether the primacy of gender categorization in humanization is more likely to be a culturally specific construct or a cross-cultural and potentially universal phenomenon. Consistent with findings from North American populations [A. E. Martin, M. F. Mason, J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 123, 292–315 (2022)], the Mayangna ascribed gender to nonhuman objects more strongly than any other social category—including age, race, sexual orientation, disability, and religion—and gender was the only social category that uniquely predicted perceived humanness (i.e., the extent to which a nonhuman entity was seen as “human”). This pattern persisted even in the most isolated subgroup of the sample, who had no exposure to Western culture or media. The present results thus suggest that gender’s primacy in social cognition is a widely generalizable, and potentially universal, phenomenon.

中文翻译：

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性别至上是否具有普遍性？


新出现的证据表明，性别是人格的一个决定性特征。研究表明，性别是个人用来感知人性的主要社会类别，也是与将某人或某物视为人类最密切相关的社会类别。然而，性别在社会认知中的首要地位及其优先于种族和年龄等其他社会类别的普遍性一直存在争议。我们研究了尼加拉瓜玛扬纳社区的性别观念的首要地位，这是一个很少受西方影响的群体，以测试人性化中性别分类的首要地位是否更有可能是一种文化特定的建构，还是一种跨文化的、潜在普遍的观念。现象。与北美人群的研究结果一致 [AE Martin, MF Mason, J.佩尔斯。苏克。心理。 123, 292–315 (2022)]，玛扬纳人比任何其他社会类别（包括年龄、种族、性取向、残疾和宗教）更强烈地将性别归因于非人类物体，并且性别是唯一预测感知人性的社会类别（即非人类实体被视为“人类”的程度）。即使在样本中最孤立的亚群中，这种模式也持续存在，他们没有接触过西方文化或媒体。因此，目前的结果表明，性别在社会认知中的首要地位是一种广泛普遍存在且可能普遍存在的现象。